"MORE THAN ONE WITNESS" SAW TRUMP COMMIT ESPIONAGE - 5.26.23

Countdown with Keith Oberman is a production of iHeartRadio. The Washington Post's choice of its headline was the Marilago workers moving boxes full of classified documents the day before the Justice Department stopped by to pick up what it had subpoenaed. But that's not the actual headline in the Washington Post story and the actual headline in the Washington Post story is really startling. It could be the biggest in this week-long festival of leaks. This waterfall of sources say Jack Smith is doing this because this leak, the one the Post did not think was the headline, suggests the special counsel is going to charge Donald Trump not just with obstruction but with espionage. Quote, prosecutors have gathered evidence indicating that Trump at times kept classified documents in his office in a place where they were visible and sometimes showed them to others. They have been told by more than one witness that Trump at times kept classified documents out in the open in his Florida office where others could see them and sometimes showed them to people including aides and visitors on quote. So that is literally textbook espionage. Ten years or fine or both per count. 18 US Code 793 gathering transmitting or losing defense information paragraph E. Keeping classified documents is one thing but having unauthorized possession of any document relating to the national defense and then willfully communicates delivers transmits or causes to be communicated to any person not entitled to receive it. That is the point. The transmission, the communication, that is the point at which the option not to prosecute for espionage has typically ended. Now Trump keeping classified documents in his office and showing them to people including aides and visitors and Marilago newlyweds and golfers and passers-by and Lord knows who else is thus way more egregious. But as I have mentioned before it also comes with a complication. Trump has satisfactorily fuzzed up this declassification idea that he could conceivably get away with it by quoting that first part in that statute about unauthorized possession and insists no I granted myself authorized possession and it's nonsensical but stuck under the nose of the correct judge like one he himself appointed and the espionage stuff could disappear from the counts. The rest of what is in the Washington Post report is about the much more straightforward charges that a different part of the piece implies are clearly happening soon and I'll get to that clearly happening soon part in a minute. The post reports boxes were moved by Marilago staffers under the guidance of the valet Walt Nouda which we knew it's been reported for months it's what's on the security video some of which may have been deleted from the security video. The post also has the colorful anecdote that Trump had a dress rehearsal for moving these boxes even before the subpoena got there. The post has the lawyer for one of the Nouda crews saying his client was loading boxes onto an SUV a year ago next Saturday and they've been showing video of that since literally last summer. Remember the SUV parked next to the private jet with bankers boxes being loaded from the car to the plane bound for Trump's golf course and cemetery in Bedminster New Jersey a year ago next Saturday and don't forget it Bedminster if your ball gets stuck in soft ground near the tee do not reach into the ground do not reach into the ground at Bedminster the first hole what you never saw the movie carry. Wandered off again sorry all of that stuff goes to willful retention of those documents especially the idea of a rehearsal for hiding the boxes and it again renders actual classified status irrelevant because obstruction of justice is still obstruction of justice if the government has subpoenaed the documents and you say you are going to give them the documents and you say you are giving them the documents and then you say you have given them the documents then it turns out no you deliberately hid some of the documents and the government does not have them and oh by the way practice hiding them at that point it doesn't matter what the documents are they don't have to be classified they could be old scripts of the countdown podcast there were two other items in the post report that you can think about over the holiday weekend because they imply his judgment cometh and that right soon quote the grand jury working on the investigation apparently has not met since may five after months of frenetic activity at the federal courthouse in washington which can only mean Smith is a already done or b he's about to be done or c he has another grand jury elsewhere collecting some final evidence and then there's the quote that suggests the correct answer is a he's done quote people familiar with the situation said Smith's team believes it has uncovered a handful of distinct episodes of obstructionist conduct for that to be correct it requires that Smith's team has everything it needs to conclude anything if Smith's team believes it has found multiple distinct episodes of obstructionist conduct and if Smith's team has shared this with anybody like whoever then shared it with the washington post it means they've got indictments ready i know i know mds muller derangement syndrome i know i know so also a little more on ron desantis and that wonderful unplanned moment of silence for his presidential campaign during his presidential campaign announcement on whatever is left of the website formerly known as twitter the website platformer has the technical explanation it is not in fact a technical explanation it is an explanation of cheapness quote perhaps the most important thing to know about spaces technical problems over the past several months must cut the spaces team which once numbered as many as 100 employees down to roughly three people three people wait there's more quote musk's own twitter app crashed repeatedly during the event we're told nice work elmo and it turns out there have been two other ron de glitches as axios reported the promotional video for the campaign launch you couldn't hear on twitter spaces it was as we say in the business sweetened the pack never back down took a speech by desantis in port st lucy florida on november 5th 2022 a speech which was not during a military fly over and it used ai to add in fighter jets in the sky over desantis's shoulder and also the whoosh they made then last night desantis resumed his tv tour his we should watch things are going so badly maybe a studio light will fall on him tv tour he went on the eric bowling show on newsmax yes that's the one that's been beating anderson cooper in the ratings and mid-interview the split screen of bowling and desantis froze but the audio continued so you saw bowling eyes almost completely closed looking stoned in other words looking like he always does and desantis eyebrows locked in the upright position and shoulders hunched and frozen in a way that made him look shorter than he even is all the time desantis kept talking without moving his mouth i mean at some point you may want to look into whether or not all these things are signs ronda and elmer stuart rodes will go to jail insisting he is a political prisoner and guess what he's not and the judge who sentenced him yesterday said plane of day he's not judge amit mehta sentenced the founder of the oath keepers to 18 years in prison for his role in january 6th and he sentenced kelly megs of the oath keepers to 12 years and after roads that went off in one of his angry rationalizations about saving the country judge made us silenced roads and per reporters on the scene silence the courtroom itself when he then said we all now hold our collective breaths with an election approaching will we have another january 6th somebody gets it all this you probably already knew what you may not know was uncovered by david kurtz of tpm who decided to examine his websites archives to see if his memory was correct and that they had been covering roads for years long before he descended into vigilantism and delusions of grandeur and sedition roads was once a ron paul staffer he was at yale law he started the oath keepers in 2009 and within months literally on february 19th 2010 in a suit and a tie and before he allegedly lost an eye after dropping his gun while he was serving as a gun safety instructor he got his first national exposure the first national television hit for stuart roads his first step down the public path to 18 years in prison for sedition and who platformed him first where was stuart roads first national tv oath keepers interview it was on fox news with bill o'riley i told you so all right let me leave you laughing trump jr trying to insult the santis but instead swapping his own father's name for desantis and winding up insulting dad check and dad thinking as he's talking about jack smith that the upcoming vote is the 2020 election check policy grounds or personality trump has the charisma of a mortician and the energy that makes jack smith he's a harasser and an abuser of our people in order to obstruct and interfere with the 2020 presidential election that's why they're doing it geniuses father and son so it's memorial day weekend and i will have a podcast for you on monday and i'm not sure if it will be new or old or half and half because we have all kinds of possible breaking news although i really doubt trump will be indicted on memorial day weekend then again i didn't think ronah mcdaniel would say that a default on the national debt would bode well for the republican presidential candidates confirming that the republican party has completely lost any understanding that it's political posturing and judicial and legislative terrorism has actual consequences including in this case immeasurable damage to the very corporations that own said republican presidential candidates losing understanding that what you do and say means more than just points on some scoreboard that exists only in your own head that it affects the real world and people's lives this may be the theme of america in the 21st century it happens everywhere it has happened at msnbc that's next this is countdown this is countdown with keith obermann i was surprised to be going through my notes and find that this moment of confession was seven years ago this week i may have indicated that i lament what one of my inventions msnbc has become it has slipped from analysis and cynicism into talking points and posturing and cheerleading and if nbc suddenly wanted it to be a right wing operation a lot of the hosts could stay and just grow mustaches or dye their hair or use aliases because it longer goes ceased to be about the issues and instead became about them the good news for msnbc in this context is that cnn is a tire fire with no signs of dying down the bad news is the political spectrum needs a healthy robust msnbc advocating from the liberal point of view but just as importantly pushing democrats to actually earn our support the entire prime time lineup at msnbc still consists of depending on the night either only people who were my guest host who we spun off into their own shows or them and another person we considered for doing that with but she could not be bothered to learn how to use a teleprompter most of them turned out personally sadly to have been false friends and mercilessly ambitious and brutal in short i never saw any of this coming on the other hand one day one of them admitted it early on the afternoon of monday may 23rd 2016 i bounced out of my new york city apartment building began to walk past the tourist trap brunch spot in lobby and froze there at one of the cramped outdoor tables staring up at me in blank surprise that must have matched my own staring down at him in blank surprise was laren so donnell i decided to go silly hey get out of my house he laughed i laughed it didn't seem forced he introduced me to his companion his daughter this my dear is kyth ulerman kyth started us all at msnbc and then he left and and here lorance gave one of his long pauses and we crashed it i wanted to be generous i started to politely contradict him and i just couldn't do it um yeah pretty much anyway about 30 seconds of courteous nothingness followed and i wish the o donnell's well and then i left it was the most pleasant experience i ever had with lorance o donnell in fact it might have been the only pleasant experience i ever had with laren so donnell after i finally convinced and bullied and blackmailed msnbc management into letting rachel matto become the regular guest host for my show and she aced it and then rightly got her own show and she aced that and became a star i went looking for a new guest host my first idea was a frequent guest we had named chris hays i didn't get far management had its own idea and my input was not required they wanted former vermont governor and democratic presidential hopeful hower dean and hower it is a really smart guy and great on tv but hower had a bit of a teleprompter problem one of my producers swears that hower had once read good evening i'm hower'd dean former governor of vermont this is countdown i do know whatever he did on the air it was bad enough that one week when i was off and at the baseball hall of fame in kupersown new york and a baseball news story broke and he was filling in for me my producers called me there and asked me to come on from the streets of kupersown and be a guest on my own show just to help hower dean out anyway their next idea was a guy who had been kicking around msnbc since its founding in 1996 larens o' donnell was one of the original msnbc friends the msnbc friends political pundits who sat on clear stools at a clear table or in a set designed to look like a booth at a coffee shop no i'm not making this up among the friends were and colter and laura ingram if you can believe it once or twice an hour the rather cnn like all news coverage on msnbc in its first couple of years would pause and three or more of these friends would appear cue over the msnbc headlines and then disappear larens o' donnell was one of the friends it was as bad as it sounds then larens o' donnell pretty much disappeared you would see him on msnbc as a guest every once in a while but mostly he pursued his acting and producing career he played president Bartlett's father on the west wing the one who beat him throughout college larens was very convincing and then around 2008 we started getting pressure to bring him in as a guest on countdown like once a week or twice a week i was not sure what that was all about but he had been a senate staffer and he knew the health care debate and other wonky stuck pretty well so i gave my ascent for whatever that was worth not long after that larens came into my office he really needed my support he said to get him more involved in msnbc he knew i had gone to bat for rachel and before her i'd gone to bat for tom brokaw and for people like chaktad and chris hayes and others who are now getting steady incomes from nbc i don't remember his argument on his own behalf i do remember i didn't have much of a reason to say no and he wasn't asking me to do a lot so i said yes the next thing i knew i was reading a memo announcing that laren so donnel had been appointed as the new full-time guest host of countdown this was in the winter of 2009 2010 when my late dad was fighting so valuantly to stay alive after colon cancer and more importantly a series of infections dad had the immune system of an alien the average white cell count in a healthy adult is between four thousand and eleven thousand one night dad's was at thirty three thousand and the doctors told me to prepare to make the call to let him go they had one antibiotic left to try on him the next morning dad's white cell count which had been thirty three thousand was eight thousand onward he fought unfortunately he was eighty years old and he had not exercised since harry trueman was president and eventually he ran out of hudini tricks i had been visiting him twice a day for six months while still doing countdown and the nbc sunday night football show but now as it hit late february of 2010 his bright days became fewer and farther in between and the hope that was propelling me to keep being his full-time caregiver and countdowns full-time host both began to fade in the last two weeks of my dad's life as the doctors tried all the long shot things i asked msnbc for a leave of absence finally the inevitability became inarguable and we let dad go on saturday march thirteenth two thousand ten my sister held his hand and i read him his favorite server story and as soon as i finished it he exhaled deeply and peacefully and he died i think i took another week off maybe two and i vaguely recall emails from friends that count down that i may have paid passing attention to but i really didn't most of the staff including people who came up from washington like howard fine men or jean robinson of the washington post always friends to me they attended my dad's memorial service i believe warren so donald who was of course filling in for me on countdown was there to but maybe not i do not remember and then came today when i went back to the office full-time and my assistant grabbed me both hands on my wrist you did not answer my emails she said with a fervency she rarely exhibited for god's sake do not ever leave me alone with lorren so donald again i snap back to attention had he you know bothered her not that way she said but he's a son of a bitch he treats me and everybody who is in a producer here like dirt and since you didn't read my emails i just have to tell you this he's trying to get you fired so he can take over countdown and if you think he's nuts one of your senior producers is in on it too with him i have to admit even now of all the things i went through at that very very strange place msnbc even now this story still shocks me the senior producers of countdown consisted of a guy who'd been a producer who booked satellite transmissions for msnbc until i asked that he be promoted and one was a guest booker for the daytime shows until i asked that she be promoted another was a line producer who was well regarded only for his ability to time a show until i asked for him to be promoted and then there was the old friend of mine who'd been blown out of his p.m. in a sexual harassment porn link email scandal and was headed back to college to start his career all over again until i asked that he be hired and then promoted i did some digging and i was going to confront o'Donnell about it when somebody told me he had tweeted something negative about me and about countdown so i got a hold of him and i said this did not seem to be in keeping with msnbc traditions and rules you know the ones about not peeing inside the tent and he said what do you know about msnbc traditions i've been here since 1996 i never left and came back so i went to my boss the president of the network phil griffin the one who would not hire rachel mattow and before i could say they'd have to get rid of him griffin said it was all academic they were preparing the press release as we spoke for lorance's new show at ten o'clock called the last word and oh by the way keith two of your senior producers are going with him to run his show if this sounds vaguely familiar to you it is the plot of the pilot for the old aran sorkin hbo series newsroom i was still friendly with aran then so he actually asked as i related this to him in real time in emails and phone calls he asked if he could use it in the plot rather than just what he often did which was to use it without asking the problem was none of this made any sense in the real world although it made a pretty good pilot for aran sorkin in going into the ten p.m. slot lorance o' donnell would be replacing a rerun of countdown and even if o' donnell did much better in the rings much much better there was no way it could ever make enough money to make the move make sense o' donnell's new show would necessarily cost msnbc between 10 and 15 million dollars to produce every year didn't have anything to do with him that was the cost the countdown rerun cost not 10 15 million dollars a year it count however much they paid the guy who pushed the play button that fired up the video tape of the countdown replay amortized later that day a sympathetic nbc executive called me up and explained the move to me first griffin was convinced o' donnell was about to leave us and sign with cnn i said well that's a good idea for everybody involved except cnn turned out cnn had not even talked to him but griffin did not know that more importantly comcast had already finalized its agreement to buy nbc effective the following january and as part of the deal they were entitled to review what all the executives in the company had done and they had already looked at msnbc president phil griffin and discovered he had never done anything in panic griffin told colleagues he had to launch a new show of his own immediately this is the series erin syrkin should have made as to the producers who left my show to go with o' donnell while my father was dying one of them told me a couple of years after she left msnbc for the last time every day when i went into that last word office i realized you were getting your revenge on me without even having to lift a finger lots of people i've worked with probably a majority of people i've helped have behaved like laren so donnell because remember its television it is a mental illness the comparatively healthy people are the ones who acknowledge it's a mental illness but laren so donnell was something special a year before my dad died almost to the day in fact i was in los angeles appearing on bill mars show and one of the other guests that night was the actress karry washington she was very nice to me very sweet a very big fan and she asked to stay in touch sure enough after my father died after the memorial after i was back at work i had to go to his house for the first time since he had passed away it was about as much fun as it sounds in the car on the way back into new york city the solemnity of it both my parents died within 11 months of each other it really hit me for some reason for the first time full force and i was about to lose it when the car approached a billboard overlooking the west sign highway in new york city and whose big smiling face was on the ad on that billboard karry washington and it flashed me right back to her kindness in l.a. and it helped me overcome this bump in my morning so i wanted to drop her a note nothing big nothing suggestive i wasn't hinting at asking her out just you never know how you might help somebody in a time of crisis thanks for letting me smile that was the whole message i asked my assistant to figure out how to get it to her and that was the end of it except a week later the fact that i wrote her a note wound up in a column written by an culture i was astonished how why and culture it was her usual the brain doesn't quite work right kind of stuff she implied i was hitting on karry washington and said how stupid i had to be to not realize she was involved with somebody and on and on and on no mention of my father's passing or the mar show or the billboard or her smiling face i went back to my assistant and i said hey uh what on earth did you do with that note to karry washington and she said oh i gave it to this uh laren so donald guy and i said good god why did you do that and she said well he's dating karry washington i thought you knew that i thought that's why you asked me to get it to her so it wasn't hard to figure out from there laren's had called his old friend from the old msnbc friends of 1996 and colter and told her about the note inventing whatever motive his jealous little mind could dream up it should have gotten him fired from nbc but unfortunately his boss was just as much of a 14-year-old emotionally as he was and meanwhile i had decided to get out of msnbc anyway when the time was ripe as it turned out it ripened in january of 2011 i've told that story in other episodes like 60 of them it's kind of complicated and since nobody ever actually asked me why count down the tv show ended i've probably got another 60 episodes worth of information about that anyway in 2015 since repeatedly over the following 10 years there were overtures by both sides to bring count down and me back to msnbc in 2015 during the world series in fact the then president of nbc news andy lack asked me to come back and do a new show at msnbc and move to los angeles and have a co-host a conservative and not do any commentaries and and actually this new show is somehow less appealing than it sounds but the punchline of all punchlines is contained in what lack wanted to call my new 2015 msnbc show that never was it tells you all you really need to know about the last word with lorence o'donnell and msnbc and o donnell's place in tv history and its demise and the end of msnbc nbc new president lack was brimming with enthusiasm about this name that he had come up with for my new show i've got the perfect title lack told me we're going to call it the last word with keith obermann and i didn't laugh or gafar i just said andy you have a show called the last word the last word with lorence o'donnell andy lack now laughed huh hopefully not for much longer i don't still ahead on countdown friday's with turber and my father's favorite turber story of many favorites it's the one he liked best first in each edition of countdown we feature a dog in need you can help every dog has its day sam warms up from shy to friendly to silently resting her head in your lap she's 47 pounds mixed breed a golden brown two years old and she was dumped at the kill shelter in new york by her humans after some kind of altercation they said with her sister nobody knows what happened but it was sam who wound up with bite marks and with that kind of history even if it was all made up the new york pound will kill her sooner rather than later she can be adopted by almost anybody on the east coast she's ready to go or you can pledge to make a donation to help arrest you pull her if she does not make it out you're under no obligation if she does we'll let you know how to fulfill your pledge but for sam photos and video of her on my twitter feeds hi thank you and sam thanks you to the number one story on the countdown and friday's with therber and i don't know when i went to celibate became my father's favorite therber story i suspect it was in the hospital when i was reading to him in the last six months of his life i know i read it to him at least half a dozen times the first five by his request the last time he did not request it in fact and this is the most perverse kind of compliment i think any writer has ever received i read this story to him it was the last thing that i read to him in fact it was the last thing he did on earth was to listen to this story in a state of semi-consciousness he waited till the end of it he took one deep satisfied breath and he died i don't recommend this but i think it does speak to the quality of the writing i went to celibate by james therber i was reminded the other morning by what i don't remember and it doesn't matter of a crisp september morning last year when i went to the grand central to see a little boy of ten get excitedly on a special coach that was to take him to a boy's school somewhere north of boston he had never been away to school before the coach was squirming with youngsters you could tell after a while the novitiates shining and tremulous and a little odd from the more aloof boys who had been away to school before but they were very much alike at first glance there was for me in case you thought i was leading up to that no sharp feeling of old lost years in the tense atmosphere of that coach because i never went away to a private school when i was a little boy i went to celibate school in columbus i thought about it as i walked back to my hotel celibate was an ordinary public school and yet it was not like any other i have ever known of in seeking an adjective to describe the celibate school of my years 1900 and 1908 i can only think of tough celibate school was tough the boys of celibate came mostly from the region around central market a poorish district with many families of the laboring class the school district also included a number of homes of the upper classes because at the turn of the century one or two old residential streets still lingered near the shouting and rumbling of the market reluctant to surrender their final houses to the encroaching rabble of commerce and become as a last they now have more vulgar business streets i remember always first of all the celibate baseball team most grammar school baseball teams are made up of boys in the seventh and eighth grades or they were in my day but with celibate it was different several of its best players were in the fourth grade known to the teachers of the school as the terrible fourth in that grade you first encountered fractions and long division and many pupils lodged there for years like logs in a brook some of the more able baseball players have been in the fourth grade for seven or eight years then too there were a number of boys who had not been in the class past the normal time but were nevertheless deep into their teens they had avoided starting to school by eluding the truant officer until they were ready to go in a long pants but he always got them in the end one or two of these fourth graders were seventeen or eighteen years old but the dean of the squad was a tall husky young man of 22 who was in the fifth grade the teachers of the third and fourth had got tired of having him around as the years rolled along and had pushed him on his name was Dana Wainey and he had a mustache don't ask me why his parents allowed him to stay in school so long there were many mysteries at celibate that were never cleared up all i know is why he kept on in school and didn't go to work he liked playing on the baseball team and he had a pretty easy time in class because the teachers had given up asking him any questions at all years before the story was that he had answered but one question in the 17 years he had been going to classes at celibate and that was what is one use of the comma the commie said Dana embarrassingly unsnarling his long legs from beneath a desk much too low for him is used to shoot mobbles with commies was our word for those cheap 10 percent marbles in case it wasn't yours the celibate school baseball team of 1905 defeated several high school teams in the city and claimed the high school championship of the state to which title it had of course no technical right i believe the boys could have proved their moral right to the championship however if they had been allowed to go out of town and play all the teams they challenged such as the powerful Dayton and Toledo nines but their road season was called off after a terrific fight that occurred during one game at Mount Sterling or pickwa or zenia i can remember which our first basement Dana Wainey crowned the umpire with a bat during an altercation over called strike and the fight was on it took place in the fourth inning so of course the game was never finished the battle continued on down into the business section of the town and raged for hours with much destruction of property but since celibate was ahead at the time 17 to nothing there could have been no doubt as to the outcome nobody was killed all of us boys were sure our team could have beaten Ohio State University that year but they wouldn't play us they were scared Wainey was by no means the biggest or toughest guy on the grammar school team he was merely the oldest being about a year the senior of Floyd the center fielder who could jump five feet straight into the air without taking a running start nobody knew and even the board of education which once tried to find out whether Floyd was Floyd's first name or his last name he apparently only had one he didn't have any parents and nobody including himself seemed to know where he lived when teachers insisted that he must have another name to go with Floyd he would grow sullen and ominous and they would cease questioning him because he was a dangerous scholar in a school room brawl as mr. Harrigan the janitor found out one morning when he was called in by a screaming teacher all our teachers were women to get Floyd under control after she had tried to whip him and he had begun to take the room apart beginning with the desks Floyd broke into small pieces the switch she had used on him some said he also ate it i don't know because i was home sick at the time with mumps or something Harrigan was a burly iron muscle janitor man come from a long line of coal shovelers but he was no match for Floyd who had to be sure the considerable advantage of being more aroused than mr. Harrigan when their fight started Floyd had him down and was sitting on his chest in no time and Harrigan had a promise to be good and to say that's what i get ten times before Floyd would let him up i don't suppose i would ever have got through Sullivan school alive if it hadn't been for Floyd for some reason he appointed himself my protector and i needed one if Floyd was known to be on your side nobody in the school would dare be after you and chase you home i was one of the 10 or 15 male pupils in Sullivan school who always are almost always knew their lessons and i believe Floyd admired the mental prowess of a youngster who knew how many continents there were and whether or not the sun was inhabited also one time when it came to be my turn to read to the class we used to take turns reading American history aloud i came across the word Duquesne and knew how to pronounce it that charmed Floyd who had been slouched in his seat idly following the printed page of his worn and pencil textbook how you know that was Duquesne boy he asked me after class i don't know i said i just knew it he looked at me with round eyes boy that's something he said after that word got around that Floyd would beat the tar out of anybody that messed around with me i wore glasses from the time i was eight and i knew my lessons and both of those things were considered pretty terrible at Sullivan Floyd had one idiosyncrasy though in the early 1900s long warm furry gloves that came almost your elbows were popular with boys and Floyd had one of the biggest pairs in school he wore them the year round dik peterson was an either in greater figure on the baseball team and in the school than Floyd was he had a way in the classroom of blurting out a long deep rolling be for no reason at all once he licked three boys his own size single-handed really single-handed for he fought with his right hand and held a mandolin in his left hand all the time it came out uninjured dick and Floyd never met in mortal combat so nobody ever knew which one could beat and the scholars were about evenly divided in their opinions many a fight started among them after school when the argument came up i think school never let out at Sullivan without at least one fight starting up and sometimes there was many as five or six raging between the corner of oak and sixth streets and the corner of rich and fourth streets four blocks away now and again virtually the whole school turned out to fight the catholic boys of the holy cross academy in fifth street near town for no reason at all in winter with snowballs and ice balls in other seasons with fists brick bats and clubs dick peterson was always in the van yelling singing beying whirling all the way around when he swung with his right or if he hadn't brought his mandolin his left and missed he made himself the pitcher on the baseball team because he was the captain he was the captain because everybody else was afraid to challenge his self-election except Floyd Floyd was too lazy to pitch and he didn't care who was captain because he didn't fully comprehend what that meant on one occasion when Earl Baddick a steam-fitter son had shut out mounds street school for six innings without a hit dick took him out of the pitchers box and went in himself he was hit hard and the other team scored but it didn't make much difference because the margin of celibance victory was so great the team didn't lose a game for five years to another grammar school when dick peterson was in the sixth grade he got into a saloon brawl and was killed when i go back to columbus i always walk past celibance school and i have never happened to get there when classes were letting out so i don't know what the pupils are like now i am sure there are no more dick peterson's and no more florids unless florid is still going to school there the play yard is still entirely bare of grass and covered with gravel and the sycamore still line the curve between the schoolhouse fence and the oak street car line a street car line running past a school house is a dangerous thing as a rule but i remember no one being injured while i was attending celibate i do remember however one person who came very near being injured he was a motor man on the oak street line and once when his car stopped at the corner of six to let off passengers he yelled at chewy davidson who played third base on the ball team and was a member of the terrible fourth to get out of the way chewy was fourteen years old but huge for his age and he was standing on the tracks taking a chew of tobacco come on down off of that car and i'll not get blocked off said chewy and what i can only describe as a celibate tone of voice the motor man waited until chewy moved slowly off the tracks then he went on about his business i think it was lucky for him that he did there were boys in those days i went to celibate by james therber i've done all the damage i can do here here the credits most of the music was arranged produced and performed by brian ray and john phillip chenale who are the countdown musical directors all orchestration and keyboards by john phillip chenale guitar space and drums by brian ray and it was produced by tko brothers other bait open selections have been arranged and performed by the group no horns allowed sports music is the oberman theme for me spn two and it was written by mitch warren davis courtesy of espn ink musical comments from nancy fouse the best baseball stadium organist ever our announcer was my friend john dean and everything else was as usual pretty much my fault so that's countdown for this the 871st day since donald trump's first attempted coup against the democratically elected government of the united states do not forget to keep arresting him while we still can the next scheduled countdown is monday memorial day as i said might be a full on core performance might be headlines in an encore i don't know if i've got something you download it if you've heard it before don't listen anymore i won't take it personal till then i'm keith old rimann good morning good afternoon good night and good luck trump has the charisma of a mortician countdown with keith old rimann is a production of iHeart radio for more podcasts from iHeart radio visit the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts